The fragment On the Question of Dialectics
is contained in a notebook between the conspectus of Lassalle’s book
on Heraclitus and the conspectus of Aristotle’s Metaphysics.
Written in 1915 in Bern.

Note that this document has undergone special formating to ensure that
Lenin’s sidenotes fit on the page, marking as best as possible
where they were located in the original manuscript.

The splitting of a single whole and the cognition
of its contradictory parts (see the quotation from Philo on Heraclitus
at the beginning of Section III, “On Cognition,” in Lasalle’s
book on Heraclitus[1])
is the essence (one of the “essentials,”
one of the principal, if not the principal, characteristics or features)
of dialectics. That is precisely how Hegel,
too, puts the matter (Aristotle in
his Metaphysics continually grapples with
it and combats Heraclitus and Heraclitean ideas).

The correctness of this aspect of the content of dialectics
must be tested by the history of science. This aspect of dialectics
(e.g. in Plekhanov)
usually receives inadequate attention: the
identity of opposites is taken as the sum-total of
examples[“for example, a
seed,” “for example, primitive
communism.” The same is true of Engels. But it is
“in the interests of popularisation...”] and not
as a law of cognition (and as a law of the
objective world).

In mathematics: + and —. Differential and integral.
In mechanics: action and reaction.
In physics: positive and negative electricity.
In chemistry: the combination and dissociation of atoms.
In social science: the class struggle.

The identity of
opposites (it would be more correct, perhaps, to say their
“unity,”—although
the difference between the terms identity and unity is not
particularly important here. In a certain sense both are
correct) is the recognition (discovery) of the contradictory,
mutually exclusive,
opposite tendencies
in all phenomena
and processes of nature (including mind and society). The
condition for the knowledge of all processes of the world in
their “self-movement,” in their
spontaneous development, in their real life, is the knowledge of them as a
unity of opposites. Development is the “struggle” of
opposites. The two basic (or two possible? Or two historically
observable?) conceptions of development (evolution) are:
development as decrease and increase, as repetition, and
development as a unity of opposites (the division of a unity
into mutually exclusive opposites and their reciprocal
relation).

In the first conception of motion,
self - movement, its driving force, its source, its motive, remains
in the shade (or this source is made external—God, subject,
etc.). In the second conception the chief attention is directed precisely
to knowledge of the source of “self”
- movement.

The first conception is lifeless, pale and dry. The second is
living. The second alone furnishes the key to
the “self-movement” of everything existing; it alone furnishes
the key to “leaps,” to the “break in continuity,”
to the “transformation into the opposite,” to the destruction
of the old and the emergence of the new.

The unity (coincidence, identity, equal action) of opposites is
conditional, temporary, transitory, relative. The struggle of
mutually exclusive opposites is absolute, just as development
and motion are absolute.

NB: The distinction between subjectivism (scepticism, sophistry,
etc.) and dialectics, incidentally, is that in (objective)
dialectics the difference between the relative and the absolute is itself
relative. For objective dialectics there is an
absolute within the relative. For subjectivism and sophistry
the relative is only relative and excludes the absolute.

In his Capital,
Marx first analyses the simplest, most
ordinary and fundamental, most common and everyday relation
of bourgeois (commodity) society, a relation encountered billions
of times, viz., the exchange of commodities. In this very simple
phenomenon (in this “cell” of bourgeois society) analysis
reveals all the contradictions (or
the germs of all
contradictions) of modern society. The subsequent exposition
shows us the development (both growth and movement) of
these contradictions and of this society in the Σ[2] of its
individual parts. From its beginning to its end.

Such must also be the method of exposition (i.e., study) of dialectics
in general (for with Marx the dialectics of bourgeois society
is only a particular case of dialectics). To begin with what is
the simplest, most ordinary, common, etc., with anyproposition:
the leaves of a tree are green; John is a man: Fido is a dog,
etc. Here already we have dialectics (as Hegel’s genius
recognised): the individual is the universal.
(cf. Aristoteles, Metaphisik, translation by Schegler, Bd. II, S. 40, 3.
Buch, 4. Kapitel, 8-9: “denn natürlich kann man nicht der Meinung sin,
daß es ein Haus (a house in general) gebe außer den sichtbaren
Häusern,” “ού γρ άν
ΰείημεν είναί
τινα οίχίαν παρα
τχς τινάς
οίχίας”).[3] Consequently, the opposites (the individual
is opposed to the universal) are identical: the individual exists only in the
connection that leads to the universal. The universal exists only in the
individual and through the individual. Every individual is (in
one way or another) a universal. Every universal is (a fragment,
or an aspect, or the essence of) an individual. Every universal
only approximately embraces all the individual objects. Every
individual enters incompletely into the universal, etc., etc.
Every individual is connected by thousands of transitions with
other kinds of individuals (things, phenomena, processes) etc.
Herealready we have the elements, the germs, the
concepts of necessity, of objective connection in nature,
etc. Here already we have the contingent and the necessary, the phenomenon
and the essence; for when we say: John is a man, Fido is a dog,
this is a leaf of a tree, etc., we disregard a
number of attributes as contingent; we separate the essence from
the appearance, and counterpose the one to the other.

Thus in any proposition we can (and must) disclose as in a “nucleus”
(“cell”) the germs of all the elements of dialectics,
and thereby
show that dialectics is a property of all human knowledge in general.
And natural science shows us (and here again it must be
demonstrated in any simple instance) objective nature
with the same qualities, the transformation of the individual
into the universal, of the contingent into the necessary,
transitions, modulations, and the reciprocal connection of
opposites. Dialectics is the theory of knowledge of
(Hegel and) Marxism. This is the “aspect” of the
matter (it is not “an aspect” but the essence
of the matter) to which Plekhanov, not to speak of other
Marxists, paid no attention.

* * *

Knowledge is represented in the form of a series of circles both
by Hegel (see Logic)
and by the modern “epistemologist”
of natural science, the eclectic and foe of Hegelianism (which he did not
understand!), Paul Volkmann (see his Erkenntnistheorische Grundzüge,[4] S.)

Dialectics as living, many-sided knowledge (with the number
of sides eternally increasing), with an infinite number of shades
of every approach and approximation to reality (with a philosophical
system growing into a whole out of each shade)—here we have
an immeasurably rich content as compared with “metaphysical”
materialism,
the fundamental misfortune of which is its inability to
apply dialectics to the Bildertheorie,[5] to the process and
development of knowledge.

Philosophical idealism
is only nonsense from the stand-
point of crude, simple, metaphysical materialism. From
the standpoint of dialectical materialism, on the other
hand, philosophical idealism is a one-sided, exaggerated,
überschwengliches (Dietzgen)[6] development (inflation,
distension) of one of the features, aspects, facets of knowl-
edge, into an absolute, divorced from matter, from nature,

apotheosised. Idealism is clerical obscurantism. True. But
philosophical idealism is (“more
correctly” and
“in addition”) a road to
clerical obscurantismthroughone of the shades of the infinitely com-
plex knowledge (dialectical) of man.

NB
this
aphor-
ism

Human knowledge is not (or does not follow) a
straight line, but a curve, which endlessly approximates a series of
circles, a spiral. Any fragment, segment, section of this curve can be
transformed (transformed one-sidedly) into an independent,
complete, straight line, which then (if one does not see the
wood for the trees) leads into the quagmire, into clerical
obscurantism (where it is anchored by
the class interests of the ruling classes). Rectilinearity and one-sidedness,
woodenness and petrification, subjectivism and subjective
blindness—voilà the epistemological roots of idealism. And
clerical obscrutantism (= philosophical idealism), of course,
has epistemological roots, it is not groundless; it is a
sterile flower undoubtedly, but a sterile flower that
grows on the living tree of living, fertile, genuine, powerful,
omnipotent, objective, absolute human knowledge.

[6] The reference to the use by Josef Dietzgen of the term
“überschwenglich,” which means: exaggerated, excessive, infinite;
for example, in the book Kleinere philosophische Schriften (Minor Philosophical
Writings), Stuttgart, 1903, p. 204, Dietzgen uses this term as follows:
“absolute and relative are not infinitely separated.”